The Time of Going Forth had made the invention of a new sunrise rite necessary. No more the daily interchange of things from within the cocoon and things from without. Instead, now, Torlyri filled a bowl every evening with bits of grass and soil from whatever place they happened to have been spending the night at, and in the morning she waved it toward the four corners of the sky and invoked the protection of the gods, and then she carried that bowl’s contents onward to empty it that evening at the next campsite. That way Torlyri constructed a continuity of sacredness as the People made their way across the face of this unfamiliar world.
Creating that continuity seemed vital to her. With Thaggoran dead, it was as though the whole past had been lopped away, and the tribe orphaned, left now without ancestors or heritage. They were stumbling forward in the dark, guessing at all they must do. With their yesterdays so cruelly severed from them by the death of their chronicler, they must build a new skein of history stretching into the years to come.
When Torlyri was done with that morning’s rite she rose to return to camp. Unexpectedly something moved beneath her feet, in the earth. She looked down, scuffed at the sandy ground, felt it quiver in response to her probing. Putting down her bowl, she brushed away the surface soil and exposed what looked like a thick glossy pink cord buried a short distance underneath. It wriggled in a convulsive way as if annoyed. Gingerly she touched a fingertip to it, and it wriggled again, so vigorously that two arm’s lengths of it burst free of the ground and arched into the air like a straining cable. The head and the tail of the thing remained hidden.
“What a nasty worm!” came a voice from above. “Kill it, Torlyri! Kill it!”
She looked up. Koshmar stood at the top of the slope.
“Why are you here?” Torlyri asked.
“Because I didn’t want to be there,” Koshmar said, smiling in an oddly self-conscious way.
Torlyri understood. There was no mistaking that smile. Koshmar must want to twine, something that they had not done since leaving the cocoon.
In the cocoon there had been twining-chambers for such intimacies; here no privacy was to be found under the great open bowl of the sky. And in the tensions and strangeness of the trek twining somehow had seemed inappropriate. Still, twining was essential to the welfare of one’s soul. For Koshmar, apparently, it could be put off no longer. So she had followed Torlyri to the offering-place; and Torlyri was glad of it. Warmly she extended a hand to her twining-partner. Koshmar scrambled down the slope beside her.
The cable-creature in the ground was still writhing. Koshmar drew her knife. “If you won’t kill it, I will.”
“No,” Torlyri said.
“No? Why not?”
“It hasn’t harmed us. We don’t know what it is. Why don’t we just let it be, Koshmar, and go somewhere else?”
“Because I hate it. It’s a hideous thing.”
Torlyri stared strangely at her. “I’ve never heard you talk that way before. Killing for the mere sake of killing, Koshmar? That isn’t like you. Let it be. All right? To kill without need is a sin against the Provider. Let the creature be.” Something was troubling Koshmar deeply, that was clear. Torlyri sought to divert her. “Look over here, at the castle these insects have built.”
Indifferently Koshmar said, “How amazing.”
“It is! Look, they’ve made a little gate, and windows and passageways, and down here—”
“Yes, it’s wonderful,” said Koshmar without looking. She put her knife away; evidently she had lost interest in the cable-creature also. “Twine with me, Torlyri,” she said.
“Of course. Right here, do you think?”
“Right here. Now. It’s been a million years.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
Torlyri nodded. Tenderly she brushed her hand against her partner’s cheek and they lay down together. Their sensing-organs touched, withdrew, touched again. Then gently they wound their sensing-organs one about the other in the delicate and intricate movements of the twining, and they entered into the first stages of their joining.
One by one they achieved the levels of linkage, easily, readily, with the skill born of long knowledge of each other. They had been twining-partners since they were girls; they had never wanted anyone else, as though they had been born as the two halves of a single whole. For some it was difficult to attain twining, but never for Koshmar and Torlyri.
Still, there were little hesitations and missed connections this time that Torlyri did not expect. Koshmar was unusually tense and taut; her whole soul seemed rigid, like a bar of some pliant metal that has been left in a cold place. Perhaps it is simply that we have not twined for a long time, Torlyri thought. But more likely the problem was something more complex than mere abstinence. She opened herself to Koshmar and as their souls merged she strove to take from Koshmar whatever dark troublesome thing had invaded her soul.
It was a communion far more intimate than mere coupling, which was an act that Koshmar had always scorned and which Torlyri had tried two or three times over the years without finding much reward in it. Most members of the tribe coupled rarely, for coupling often led to breeding, and breeding was necessarily a rare event, since the need for replacement of tribesfolk was so infrequent in the cocoon. But twining — ah, twining, that was something else! Twining was a way of love, yes, and a way of healing, and in some instances a way also of attaining knowledge that could not be had by any other means; and it was much more besides.
Their bodies held each other and their souls held each other and together they floated down and down and down, through all the levels that led to their goal of warm dark union, drifting like feathers on warm gusts, weightless, effortlessly carried onward, passing without difficulty around the rocky scarps and jagged boulders of the soul, negotiating with pure simplicity the treacherous canyons and gullies of the mind. Until at last they were fully joined and they were at oneness within each other, each encompassing and enclosing the other, each fully open to the flow and rush of the other’s soul. Torlyri sought for the source of Koshmar’s anguish, but she could not find it; and then in the joyous union of twining she no longer could devote herself to anything but the twining itself.
Afterward they lay close together, warm, fulfilled.
“Is it gone from you now?” Torlyri asked. “The shadow, the cloud that was on you?”
“I think it is.”
“What was it? Will you tell me?”
Koshmar was silent for a while. She seemed to be struggling to articulate the anguish within her, which Torlyri had been able to perceive in their twining only as a dark, hard knot that could neither be penetrated nor understood nor made to uncoil.
After a time Koshmar dug her fingers lightly into Torlyri’s dense black fur and said, as if from a great distance, “Do you remember what the hjjk-man said, his last words to us? There are no humans, flesh-woman, is what he said.”
“I remember that, yes.”
“It remains in my mind, and it burns me, Torlyri. What could he have meant by that?”
Torlyri turned so that her eyes were close to Koshmar’s shining intense ones. “He was speaking mere idle mischief. He wished to trouble our souls, that’s all. He was impatient, he was bothered because we weren’t letting him pass. So he said something that he hoped would hurt us. It was only a lie.”
“He spoke the truth about the rat-wolves,” Koshmar pointed out.
“Even so. That doesn’t mean that anything else he said was true.”
“But what if it was? What if we’re the only ones, Torlyri?” Koshmar seemed to force the words from the pit of her chest.
The chilling thought echoed Torlyri’s own baleful speculations of a little while before. Somberly she declared, “The same thing has occurred to me, Koshmar. And also the thought of the responsibility that lies upon us to survive, if we sixty are the only humans left in the world. If all the others perished in the hardships of the Long Winter.”